We examine factors that may contribute to 'overconfidence' in relative ability on an intelligence test. We test experimentally for evidence of self-esteem concerns and instrumental strategic concerns. Errors in Bayesian updating are rare when the information does not involve own relative...

We test experimentally an explanation of over and under confidence as motivated by (perhaps unconscious) strategic concerns, and find compelling evidence supporting this hypothesis in the behavior of participants who send and respond to others' statements of confidence about how well they have...

This article examines whether social comparisons have behavioral effects on workers' performance when a firm can choose workers' wages or let them choose their own. Firms can delegate the wage decision to neither, one or both workers in the firm. We vary the information workers receive, finding...

Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of “social preferencesâ€. We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with...

Departures from pure self interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of "social preferences". We conduct experiments on simple two-person and three-person games with binary choices that test these theories more directly than the array of games conventionally considered. Our...

While the theoretical industrial organization literature has long argued that excess capacity can be used to deter entry into markets, there is little empirical evidence that incumbent firms effectively behave in this way. Bagwell and Ramey (1996) propose a game with a specific sequence of moves...

We explore the effects of social distance on reciprocal behavior in an experiment conducted over the Internet on three continents and in classroom laboratory sessions conducted in Israel and Spain. Our design elicitsindividual behavior profiles over a range of contingencies, enabling us to...

Social facilitation describes the effect on performance due to the mere presence of others. Here we study the effect of the mere presence of an audience on the behavior of people involved in a strategic interaction and on the performance of institutions. In our laboratory experiment, two active...

We explore the effects of social distance on reciprocal behavior in an experiment conducted over the Internet on three continents and in classroom laboratory sessions conducted in Israel and Spain. Our design elicits individual behavior profiles over a range of contingencies, enabling us to...

We study the following basic intuition: when faced with a decision how to split their investment between a risky lottery and an asset with a fixed return, people increase the proportion invested in the risky option the more they like the lottery. We find counter-examples to this, and in fact we...